4
Reading and Writing America: Bharati Mukherjeeâs Jasmine and Eva Hoffmanâs Lost in Translation
At ten in the morning on a Monday I arrived in New York City. There were scores of policemen swinging heavy nightsticks, but none of them pounced on me at the bottom of the escalator. They were, indeed, watching. A black man in shredded pants asked me for a handout. Beggars in New York! I felt Iâd come to America too late. I felt cheated.
âBHARATI MUKHERJEE, JASMINE
The America of [Mary Antinâs] time gave her certain categories within which to see herselfâa belief in self-improvement, in perfectability of the species, in moral uplift. . . . And what is the shape of my story, the story my time tells me to tell? A hundred years ago, I might have written a success story, without much self-doubt or equivocation. A hundred years ago, I might have felt the benefits of a steady, self-assured ego, the sturdy energy of forward movement, and the excitement of being swept up into a greater national purpose. But I have come to a different America.
âEVA HOFFMAN, LOST IN TRANSLATION
At 9:28 p.m. on July 3, 1986, President Ronald Reagan addressed an exuberant crowd assembled on New Yorkâs Governors Island. At the presidentâs side was First Lady Nancy Reagan (an Empire State native), festively clothed in red and white. Standing behind a podium emblazoned with the presidential seal, the former California governor wore subdued navy blue. A glitzy blue-white backdrop completed the American flag tableau. Irrefutably, the president and the First Lady were executive actors in a televised event, held in honor of the Statue of Liberty. Aptly named Liberty Weekend (and labeled âThe Party of the Centuryâ by New York mayor Ed Koch), the ABC-produced spectacle was meant to observe Lady Libertyâs one hundredth birthday and unveil her recent $86 million makeover. Part patriotic celebration, part opportunistic profit, the celebration was indubitably marked by commodified commemoration.1
From Lady Liberty-themed tobacco and charcoal briquettes to beach towels and dry-roasted peanuts, the statueâs symbolic function as immigrant shrine at times spoke more to free markets than democratic freedom. But despite such commodity-driven fanfare, the statueâs symbolic function as immigrant emblem remained front and center. Fittingly, Lady Liberty had, a century earlier, traveled 3,600 trans-Atlantic miles from her native France to the United States. Incontrovertibly, as the telegenic fortieth president averred: âMiss Liberty, like the many millions sheâs welcomed to these shores, is of foreign birth, the gift of workers, farmers, and shopkeepers and children who donated hundreds of thousands of francs to send her here.â2
The statueâs journey mirrored the contemporaneous exodus of almost twelve million European immigrants, including the likes of Abraham Cahan and Mary Antin. âMiss Libertyâ would also bear symbolic witness to multiple mid- and late-century migrations, as East Asian, South Asian, and Southeast Asian immigrants arrived en masse to U.S. shores. Their journeys to the âpromised landâ were chiefly enabled by legislative routes. In particular, the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, the 1975 Indochinese Migration/Refugee Assistance Act, and the 1980 Refugee Act facilitated a profound demographic shift, comprised of Koreans, Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians seeking economic opportunity, educational access, and cold war âasylumâ due to failed U.S. foreign policy.
Such immigrant bodiesâjoined by migrants from Latin America, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, and refugees from eastern Europeâwould constitute the majority of New York Cityâs population growth in the 1980s and 1990s. Following a decade of deindustrialization, stagflation, and white flight, the âCrossroads of the Worldâ had suffered a 13.8 percent drop in population.3 However, by 1990, The New York Times noted that âimmigration remade much of the city. . . . New Yorkers born abroad constituted a majority of residents in the five [boroughs].â4 In 2000, 35.9 percent of the cityâs population would be foreign-born, speaking 170 different languages. By centuryâs end, English was not the primary language in almost half of all New York City households, linguistically confirming the cityâs status as a global hub.5
Amid this post-1965 multiethnic, polyvocal, multicultural imaginary, Reaganâs âLady Libertyâ comments anachronistically call attention to a late-century transnational current of bodies and capital. Concentrated on foreign-born benevolence and foreign-dollar kindness (manifest in diplomatic declarations of âwelcome,â acknowledgments of âgifts,â and recognition of âdonationsâ), Reaganâs remarks nonetheless engender an affective, immigrant narrative. Such oft-accessed sentimentality is emblematized by Miss Liberty whoâin true beacon fashionâprojects an idealized, open-door America. Simultaneously, Reaganâs mention of âhundreds of thousands of francs,â recalling the statueâs past and mindful of its recent multimillion dollar restoration, locates the âmother of exilesâ within the confines of a two-sided economy.
In particular, Reaganâs Statue of Liberty is both âimmigrantâ and âcommodity,â a foreign-funded body deployed in the exceptional service of U.S. nationhood. Such labor is forged through the strategic omission of exclusionary immigration politics, built on a narrative of nostalgic timelessness. Correspondingly, Lady Libertyâand by extension immigrant writersâare cast as two sides of the same coin. To that end, the Statue of Liberty, as conceived by the fortieth president, is an eternal reminder of a maudlin immigrant past, carrying in the process the same âthen and nowâ symbolic currency. Within this âforeign-bornâ triumphalism, Indian American Bharati Mukherjee and Polish Canadian/American Eva Hoffman seem ideal open-door subjects. A self-described âimmigrant living in a continent of immigrants,â Mukherjee as writer at once embraces her foreign-born past; analogously, Hoffman celebrates immigration as âa sort of location in itself.â6 As a matter of fact, Reagan makes no distinction between various waves of immigrants, representing them instead via quantity (âmillionsâ). Therefore, Mukherjee and Hoffman become two out of âmillionsâ ostensibly welcomed to U.S. shores.
Nonetheless, as the opening epigraphs make clear, Mukherjee and Hoffman write decidedly pessimistic narratives about the United States. On the one hand, such critical considerations reinscribe a temporal dimension to immigration. Mukherjeeâs protagonist Jasmine, an undocumented worker, laments that she has âcome to America too late.â Hoffman rues that she has âcome to a different Americaâ from that of her turn-of-the-twentieth-century Antin counterpart. Despite affective coherences, the cause for discontent varies between fictional protagonist and autobiographer. Jasmineâs declaration of âlatenessâ is constructed through the policing of undocumented foreign bodies and dissolution of capitalist promise. Hoffmanâs anxiety is fixed to the elusive nature of self-definition in a hyphenated American landscape.
On the other hand, Jasmine and Lost in Translation register the tenor and outcome of contemporaneous immigration debates, which largely focused on illegality and bilingualism. A prime example can be found in an April 18, 1986, New York Times âLetter to the Editorâ authored by Chief Border Patrol Agent Alan E. Eliason of San Diego County. The agent warned readers of an unprecedented escalation in illegal migration, claiming that âapprehensions [of undocumented workers] have risen by an incredible 48 percent over the same period a year ago.â Even more extreme, Eliason alleged that San Diego County was âencountering an average of one illegal alien every 35 secondsâ and âwe know that weâre locating, at best, about half the flow of illegal entrants.â Asking âDo we truly have to absorb the worldâs surplus populations until we become like the third-world countries from which they come: overpopulated, with our resources depleted and with massive unemployment?â Eliason then concluded with an all-too-familiar assertion of âa swelling [immigrant] flood.â7 Focused on resources, employment, and potential overpopulation, Eliason accesses a supply-side vocabulary wherein the United Statesâ status as first-world country is threatened by third-world poverty and need.
A multicultural nativist, Eliason later âreportedâ in a April 21, 1986, New York Times article that âthe number of would be immigrants from Central and South America, Korea, Hong Kong, the Middle East and other parts of the world was increasing even faster.â8 Eliasonâs admonition of an inevitable âbrownâ and âyellowâ floodâor perilâwas echoed by fellow San Diego County lawman John Duffy. In the same New York Times âexposĂ©,â Sheriff Duffy (in equally alarmist fashion) contended that âa third of the men arrested for rape in the county last year were illegal aliensâ and that âaliens were involved in a third of the murders, either as killers or victims.â9 Focusing principally on criminality, Eliason and Duffy produce a reading of an uncontrolled alien flood that threatens the very foundations of family, community, and nation.
Nonetheless, Sheriff Duffy was not limited to the dystopic âalienâ present. Indeed, the sheriff further opined: âIllegal aliens are gradually affecting the quality of life as we know it. Now we have to admit illegal aliens into our colleges, which means my grandchildren may not be granted entry because of an illegal alien, and theyâll probably require her to be bilingual.â10 In so doing, Duffy wages an attack on post-1965 multiculturalism, which threatens ânative-bornâ (and by implication âwhiteâ) opportunity. Concomitantly, Duffy casts âillegal aliensâ as both intergenerational menace and multivalent pollutants who âhave to be admittedâ to colleges (because of affirmative action) at the expense of Duffyâs grandchildren. Further adding fuel to the nativist fire, âlegitimate and legalâ child bodies will âundeniablyâ be contaminated through forced multicultural bilingual education.
Duffyâs focus on literacy and language make visible the means through which Bharati Mukherjee and Eva Hoffman read and write âAmericaâ through late 1980s immigration politics and conservative culture wars. Published in the aftermath of heated debates over undocumented workers, thousand-mile border fences, and bilingual education, Mukherjeeâs Jasmine (1989) and Eva Hoffmanâs Lost in Translation (1989) imagine (or write) two different âAmericas.â Each makes legible (or reads) an uncertain sociopolitical terrain that forcefully naturalizes foreign bodies. Concurrently, U.S. âpromiseâ gives way to disappointment. Rather than âopen arms,â Mukherjeeâs protagonist is greeted by surveillance (e.g., the âscores of policemenâ who âwatchâ) and racialized poverty (emblematized by the African American beggar). Noting that a âblack man in shredded pantsâ asks for a handout, Jasmine problematically recuperates Reaganâs language vis-Ă -vis âwelfare mothersâ and anti-affirmative action claims. For Hoffman, immigrant success stories necessarily dissolve into narratives of self-doubt and equivocation.
If Mukherjee and Hoffman read a divisive politics in their writings about contestations over U.S. selfhood, Jasmine and Lost in Translation also call attention to a still unresolved immigrant imaginary in the face of recent immigration reform. Deemed a late twentieth-century solution to the âimmigration problem,â the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) was the legislative culmination of a five-year struggle. Sponsored by Wyoming Senator Alan K. Simpson (Republican) and Kentucky Representative Romano L. Mazzoli (Democrat), the bipartisan IRCA was touted by President Ronald Reagan. The fortieth president purposefully accessed the more âprogressiveâ dimensions of the McCarran-Walter Act in his declaration that the IRCA was âthe most comprehensive reform of our immigration laws since 1952.â
Promising to curb undocumented immigration through employer sanctions and increased surveillance of work authorization forms (including the introduction of the I-9 form), the Simpson-Mazzoli Act also included concessions to agribusiness via temporary work visas. Through citizenship provisions, the 1986 Immigration Reform Act carried what proponents like Reagan repeatedly termed a âhumanitarianâ response to the impending citizenship crisis. Though not an open-door policy, the Immigration Reform and Control Act offered a hybrid âclosed door/naturalizationâ solution. With economic penalties of $250 to $10,000 levied against employers who hired undocumented workers, the congressional sponsors of the act averred that the primary incentive for illegal immigrationâjob opportunitiesâwould be eliminated.11
After five years as permanent residents, those individuals could apply for U.S. citizenship. Further, the law afforded immigrants who had resided âin an unlawful statusâ before January 1, 1982, legality or âamnesty.â Defined as an act of pardon, this amnesty provision drew the most ire from antireform advocates, who claimed that immigrants who entered the country illegally were rewarded with U.S. citizenship. As per the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, undocumented immigrants would have one year to seek legal status. First, such individuals would become lawful temporary residents. After eighteen months, those temporary residents could become permanent residents, provided they demonstrate âa minimal understandingâ of the English language and âsome knowledge of the history and government of the United States.â12 On another level, the act was fixed to an alleged humanitarian understanding of the âimmigration problemâ which necessitated intervention, bureaucratization, and asylum.
Such humanitarianism is fundamentally founded on capitalist enterprise and alienation in Jasmine and Lost in Translation. To reiterate, Mukherjee and Hoffman construct immigrant stories set not in a promised land but within a âfalse promisedâ nation. Correspondingly, if Jasmineâs eponymous protagonist feels cheated, then Hoffman is analogously left wondering âwhat shape her story will take.â Central to Jasmine and Lost in Translation is the means through which capitalist desire produces alienated identities vis-Ă -vis immigrant bodies. As Mukherjeeâs protagonist proclaims, âOn the streets I saw only more greed, more people like myself. New York was an archipelago of ghettos seething with aliens.â13 Though Hoffman notes that âAmerica. . . . has for us the old fabulous associations: streets paved with gold, the goose that laid the golden egg,â she nonetheless is still âa Jew, an immigrant, half-Pole, half-Americanâ who âsuffer[s] from certain syndromes because she was fed on stories of war.â14
Situated in the midst of U.S. exceptionalism and amnesty, Jasmine and Lost in Translation make visible a set of politicized exchanges that take economic form. And, in so doing, Mukherjee and Hoffman take on the economics of naturalization, which hinge on labor, cultural currency, and political cachet. For Mukherjeeâs Jasmine, the protagonistâs labor as a dutiful spouse and caregiver determines her access to naturalized U.S. selfhood. In contrast, Hoffmanâs failure to adequately translate (despite her position as a writer) produces a composite, denaturalized identity. Not incidentally, such literary exchanges reflect a contemporaneous shift in immigration law that married together politics and economics. Indeed, the Simpson-Mazzoli Actâwhich ostensibly granted asylum to undocumented workers and strengthened extant border patrol provisionsâtransformed U.S. citizenship into commodity at the level of rhetoric and practice. As President Ronald Reagan proclaimed in response to the 1986 immigration reform, âFuture generations will be thankful for our efforts to humanely regain control of our borders and thereby preserve the value of one of the most sacred possessions of our people, American citizenship.â15
Regulation and Naturalization: Bharati Mukherjeeâs Jasmine
Last week on our favorite cable channel, Du and I saw twenty INS agents raid a lawn furniture factory in Texas. The man in charge of the raid called it a factory, but all it was a windowless shed the size of a two-car garage. . . . .A woman in a flowered dress said, âI donât think theyâre bad people, you know. Itâs just that thereâs too many of them. Yesterday I opened the front door to get the morning papers and there were three of them using my yard as a personal toilet.â
âJASMINE, 22â23
In a September 10, 1989, New York Times review, Smith College professor Michael Gorra affirmed, âJasmine stands as one of the most suggestive novels we have about what it is to become an American.â Further, Gorra observed that Mukherjeeâs protagonist is an exile who âchooses to redefine [her experience through] immigration as the Indian-born Mukherjee herself has recently done in choosing to become an American citizen.â16 Gorra was not alone in his selfhood-oriented praise of Mukherjeeâs Jasmine. An unnamed USA Today critic concurred with Gorraâs ânationalâ reading, insisting that âMukherjee forces us to see our country anew.â17 The most assimilationist evaluation of Mukherjeeâs novel came from the Baltimore Sun, which likewise contended that Jasmine, âthe story of the transformation of an Indian girl, whose grandmother wants to marry her off at 11,â turns out to be a triumphant narrative of âan American woman who finally thinks for herself.â18 A fantastical story about an Indian widow who comes to the United States, makes her way from Florida to New York to Iowa, and eventually (or âfinallyâ) becomes âAmerican,â Jasmine evocatively and troublingly uncovers asymmetrical global politics, second-wave feminisms, and established U.S. expansionist narratives.
To be sure, the unproblematic story of a âthird worldâ subject made âfirst worldâ Americanârecurrent in mainstream appraisals of the novelâdrew justified postcolonial critique. For example, Aijaz Ahmad and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak deconstruct Mukherjeeâs past and present deployment of essentialized South Asian subjectivity in the service of a North American hegemonic nationalism and exaltation of assimilative American-ness.19 Postcolonial critics take issue with the novelâs largely uncontextualized conflict between Punjab Hindus and Sikhs, traditional gender roles, and superstitious scenes of all-too-familiar âthird world backwardness.â The regressive politics and practices of the country of origin operate in direct contrast to the novelâs depictions of U.S. modernity and capitalist practices. Such modernity, constructed through scenes of urbanization and the protagonistâs declarations of ordered (and often unimpeded) progress, set the problematic stage for Jasmineâs exceptionalist transformation from a grief-stricken suicidal widow to an American âgreedy with wants and reckless from hopeâ (214).
Such an exceptionalist transformation is rooted in Jasmineâs naturalization in the novel. Though the novel is set in India and the United States, Jasmine begins with an Americanized Indian protagonist who tells the story of her journey from Indian peasant to middle-class U.S. subject. Retrospectively imagined, Jasmineâs achronological narrative structure mirrors the frenzied nature of the protagonistâs multisited migrations, foreshadowed in the novelâs opening epigraph on chaos theory.20 Jasmineâs penultimate identity as âJane Ripplemeyerââthe twenty-four-year-old expectant mother and live-in partner of wheel chairâbound Iowan banker Bud Ripplemeyer (who was shot by a disgruntled bank customer upset about impending foreclosure)âframes the protagonistâs past identities, Jyoti, Jasmine, Jazzy, and Jase. Admittedly the most âassimilatedâ name in the novel, âJane Ripplemeyerâ nonetheless structurally coheres with the protagonistâs other identities. Taken together, the names make visible cartographies of geographic location and citizenship as an Indian, an American, and an Indian American.
Moreover, the novelâs âname motifâ draws attention to Jasmineâs fixation on identity. This preoccupationâmanifest in protagonist declarations of being Americanâmarries filial desire with coming-of-age adulthood, which produces a revised nation-state affiliation. Though it is in many ways a prototypical American immigrant story, focused on rebirth and remaking, literary critic Patricia Chu rightly notes that Mukherjee draws from the genre power of the British bildungsroman, replete with negotiations of class and race. This reading is certainly apparent in the novelâs plot and the protagonistâs own allusions to Charlotte BrontĂ«âs Jane Eyre.21 Mukherjee employs a colonial British frame that in turn gives way to an individualistic American story of freedom and self-actualization. Like BrontĂ«âs Jane, Mukherjeeâs Jasmine is a live-in governess (or âcaretakerâ) for an American family; she looks after Taylor and Wylie Hayesâs child, Duff, and she also cares for Bud Ripplemeyer after he is shot and paralyzed. As part of this Iowan âfamily unit,â she also cares for Du, a Vietnamese male adolescent Bud sponsors.
Alternatively, the designation Jane Ripplemeyer and its very quotidian nature attest to the protagonistâs initial location as a twenty-four-year-old narrator in Americaâs heartlandâIowa. In contrast, the protagonistâs concluding reclamation of the given name Jasmine underscores the protagonistâs reconciliation of her past widowhood (in India) and her blossoming romantic present with Taylor (in the United States). A designation in both the country of origin and the country of settlement, the name Jasmine makes legible the movement of an Indian immigrant body into the United States. At the same time, the forename Jasmine concretizes the protagonistâs newfound citizenship status as an âIndian American.â All the same, Jasmineâs seemingly name-driven embrace of transnational multiplicity is destablized by her actions in the novel.
Specifically, even if the name Jasmine indicates a transnational history, the character Jasmine is decidedly more invested in a nationalâand not transnationalâcitizenship project. Although she is a transnational due to immigration, Jane/Jasmine begins and ends the novel a transplanted American. Indeed, the name Jasmineâredolent of a plant native in tropical Old World localesâpromulgates a reconsideration of the novelâs closing moments. In particular, the protagonistâs reclamation of this name underscores a successful U.S. transplantation through a fitting horticultural metaphor. It is through transplantation (born out of the uprooted experience of involuntary exile) that Jasmine paradoxically finds rootedness. Following suit, Jasmine equally engages the naturalization process, wherein she repudiates her former Indian identity in favor of Americanness.
Even so, a major impediment to Jasmineâs âcoming of ageâ as an immigrant-turned-American is her illegal immigrant status, which limits the protagonistâs unimpeded access to the nation as state-authorized citizen. Jasmineâs early admission that she was not only a âcaretakerâ but an âundocumented âcaregiverâ during [her] years in Manhattanâ underscores this obstructed subject position (34). Jasmine as undocumented worker faces possible regulation in a post-1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act state, a point made clear by the opening epigraph. Consequently, Jasmineâs coming-of-age American story carries with it an added weight of illegitimacy. This illegitimacy is ultimately resolved through immigrant-focused (and naturalized) speech acts inherent in the rhetoric of naming. Therefore, insofar Mukherjeeâs novel is about ânames,â Jasmine is dominated by the act of naming, which offers agency through state-authorized complicity. Jasmineâs illegality unfolds via a narrative of âamnestyâ consistent with extant U.S. immigration law.
Born âJyoti,â the protagonist spends her childhood in the rural Indian village Hasnapur. Jyoti/Jasmineâs future is foretold âlifetimes ago . . . under a banyan tree.â The national tree of India, the banyan image reinforces not only Jyotiâs birth location but her citizenship status. In the face of de jure citizenship, Jyoti/Jasmine will nevertheless encounter statelessness. According to the astrologerâs vision which opens the novel, the seven-year-old Jyoti will live in âwidowhood and exileâ (1). From the outset, the protagonist is situated between spousal and national loss (âwidowhoodâ and âexileâ). It is Jyoti/Jasmineâs foretold (and actualized) widowhood that prompts her exile. Further, the declaration of âlifetimes agoâ presages the protagonistâs many lives and names to come.
The first of these âadultâ lives commences in India, when at fourteen Jyoti marries Prakash Vijh. Jyoti is renamed âJasmine,â signaling her heteronormative identity as wife. Simultaneously, Prakashâs insistence that his wife have a name is presented within the novel as a progressive, nontraditional act. Prakashâs articulation of a proper spousal name contradicts the more traditional practice of pronoun usage between husband and wife. Concomitantly, the protagonistâs renaming coincides with her development into a resourceful woman who happily works alongside her husband. An electronics repairman, Prakash initially aspires to own a shop. Ostensibly interested in a spousal economic partnership (which speaks to a second-wave feminist concern about equality in the workplace), Prakash envisions the husband/wife owned and operated âVijh and Vijh.â This entrepreneurial desire is supplanted by Prakashâs plan to study in the United States. Accepted by a university in Tampa, Florida, Prakash intends (as a student) to pursue the âAmerican dream.â This educational desire coincides with the post-1965 dreams of countless numbers of Asian immigrants, who came specifically to study in American universities.
Jasmineâs prophesized widowhood begins at nineteen when Prakash is killed by a terrorist bomb, the victim of a militant Sikh attack. Now an Indian widow, Jasmine is forced to return to her childhood home and live with her mother. Electing to abandon this existence, Jasmine decides to travel to Tampa the aforementioned site of Prakashâs âAmerican dream.â In Tampa Jasmine intends to honor her husband and commit sati (ritual suicide). In order to leave India, Jasmine must obtain forged citizenship papers. Therefore, her journey to the United States begins illegally, anticipating the undocumented subject position she will hold for the remainder of the novel.
As the protagonist âphantomsâ her way âthrough three continents,â the last leg of Jasmineâs trip to the United States is aboard the Gulf Shuttle, a smuggling vessel that operates under the less illicit guise of a shrimper. The unlawful enterprise of the Gulf Shuttle reconfirms the âillegalityâ of Jasmineâs journey to the United States. This undocumented status (configured through her own location as a transnational, border-crossing subject) connects Jasmine to a larger flow of âoutcasts and deportees, strange pilgrims visiting outlandish shrines, landing at the end of tarmacs, ferried in old army trucks where we are roughly handled and taken to roped-off corners of waiting rooms where surly, barely wakened customs guards await their bribeâ (90â91). Initially treated as an âoutcastâ because of her widow status and forged citizenship papers, Jasmine inhabits the same stateless space of ârefugees and mercenaries and guest workersâ who take âout for the hundredth time an aerogram promising a job or space to sleepâ (90). Reliant on an underground economy wherein âbarely wakened customs guards await their bribe,â Jasmine is a citizenship outlaw. Outside the perimeters of the law and nation-state, Jasmine contemplates her own selfhood, provocatively asking, âWhat country? What continent?â (91).
Though an illegitimate subject, Jasmine reminds readers that such statelessness occurs for a reason. As the protagonist asserts, she and the other âdeporteesâ are forced to seek transnational routes as a result of war and plague. Be that as it may, this illicit noncitizenship makes Jasmine an âunnaturalâ body within an imaginary of world borders and nation-state contours. Relegated to living âundercover,â Jasmine, like the millions of immigrants, enters the country without the cover of law. However, unlike other immigrants and refugees, Jasmineâs intended U.S. missionâto commemorate her husband through satiâunintentionally ameliorates such illegality. Contrasted with those who seek their fortunes and asylum in the U.S., Jasmine initially has no designs on the American dream. Instead, Jasmine yearns âto breathe freeâ through death and permanent closure.
Jasmineâs search for sacred reconciliation through sati is made profanely untenable by Half Face, the Gulf Shuttleâs captain. Half Face is aptly named, for he âlost an eye and ear and most of his cheek in a paddy field in Vietnamâ (93). His service in the warâwhich comes at great physical and emotional costâsubstantiates his status as a loyal U.S. subject. His literal âloss of faceâ echoes a national loss via the shame of the Vietnam War. He is thus the âmonstrousâ product of a disastrous U.S. foreign policy. However, his actions after the warâas a smuggler of immigrant bodiesâmake him a âtraitorâ vis-Ă -vis an increasingly regulated U.S. immigrant economy. If Half-Faceâs physicality bespeaks the failure of foreign policy, his current self-employment attests to a breakdown in U.S. domestic policy. After all, Half-Face makes a successful living smuggling human cargo. His ability to bring âundercover bodiesâ is in part predicated on the absence of adequate border controls. Half-Face highlights the inefficacy of contemporary immigration law. And Jasmineâs successful migration to the United States confirms the porosity of U.S. borders.
Armed only with a suitcase filled with her husbandâs clothes and a university brochure, with no connections and with little means, Jasmine is forced to travel with Half-Face, who takes her to a remote motel. Half-Faceâs criminality as an immigrant smuggler is exacerbated by his subsequent rape of the young widow. In the motel bathroom, Jasmine contemplates the involuntary removal of her subjectivity as a traditional Indian woman and seizure of female agency. With knife in hand, Jasmine relates, âI extended my tongue, and sliced it. Hot blood dripped immediately in the sinkâ (105). This act of self-violence prefigures Jasmineâs revenge killing of Half-Face.
Afterward, Jasmine reveals:
I had not given even a dayâs survival in America a single thought. This was the place I had chosen to die, on the first day if possible. I would land, find Tampah, walking there if necessary, find the college grounds and check it against the brochure photo. . . . I had dreamed of arranging the suit and twigs. . . . I had protected this sari, and Prakashâs suit, through it all. Then he [Half Face] touched it. He had put on the suit, touched my sari, my photographs, and Ganpati. (107â108)
The slicing of her tongue initially renders Jasmine speechless, yet her next actionâthe violent stabbing of Half-Faceâspeaks to a newfound sense of self (and renewed sense of survival) forged through sexual violence. Following the murder of her assailant, Jasmine decides not only to live but âlive in Americaâ (emphasis added)â (108).
As such, the protagonist elects to fulfill one of the requirements for naturalization via residency. This sets the stage for Jasmineâs preoccupation with American mythos through immigrant-turned-citizen revision. Jasmine further relates, âMy body was merely the shell, soon to be discarded. Then I could be reborn, debts and sins all paid for. . . . With the first streaks of dawn, my first full American day, I walked out the front drive of the motel to the highway and began my journey, traveling lightâ (108). The protagonistâs articulation of ârebirthâ and reconciliation (âdebts and sins all paid forâ) at once motions to the realization Jasmine no longer has to commit sati because the rape and subsequent revenge murder have effectively killed her former self. The double death that occursâHalf-Face and the former Indian widow Jasmineâbuttresses the protagonistâs claim that her past life is in fact a shelâ that will soon be discarded.
Another reading surfaces when the enunciation of debt repayment is placed alongside extant U.S. immigration policy. Jasmine not only pays back the âdebt and sinâ of her previous life through the revenge killing of Half-Face. She also pays forward on the âsinâ of immigrant illegality. A smuggler of human cargo, Half-Face is in direct violation of immigration law. As a sexual predator and smuggler, Half-Face endangers the moral sanctity of the nation and the political borders. If Jasmine initially arrives to the States an illegal immigrant, then the killing of Half-Face makes her a de facto border patrol guard, an unintentional âmodelâ enforcer of INS policy. Within this immigrant-focused milieu, Jasmineâs revenge is personally justifiable and sanctioned by the U.S. nation-state. In the process, Mukherjee naturalizes Jasmineâs actions for a dominant U.S. readership.
For those reasons, Jasmine makes apparent a different type of âmodel minorityâ reading. Situated as Jasmine is âwithin a historical moment marked by popular apprehensions of a crisis in American identity attributed to the changes caused by the new immigration and ethnic separatism indentified with multiculturalism,â Susan Koshy convincingly argues that Jasmineâs relationships with American men in the novel make visible her sexual model minority status.22 Maintaining that Jasmine is a âsexual model minority,â Koshy observes that such an âaffirmative discourseâ masks âthe psychological costs of assimilation that the text dare not name, but which erupts periodically in episodes of seemingly agentless violence.â23 Acknowledging Koshyâs analysis of Jasmine through rubrics of sexual model minoritization and sexual naturalization, Jasmineâs rapeâa potent âepisode of seemingly agentless violenceâânonetheless engenders a complementary examination of model minoritiziation.
In particular, this multivalent model minoritization is evident when fixed to a contemporary immigration policy increasingly focused on the regulation of employers and smugglers. Though Jasmine is denied agency through sexual violence, she nonetheless becomes an accidental agent of the state through her capital punishment of Half Face. This is not to suggest that Jasmine consistently assumes a border patrol agent position. Indeed, what follows destabilizes a uniform application of Jasmine as constant border patrol actor. Jasmine is rescued by Lillian Gordon, a sympathetic figure who provides undocumented immigrants refuge. Still, what separates Half-Face from Lillian is the question of exploitation. If the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli Act intended to fine employers for exploiting undocumented labor, then Half-Faceâs sexual exploitation and immigrant profiteering make him the ultimate state villain.
In contrast, Lillianâs status as a âmother of exilesâ occurs without any money-making agenda. Still, as later revealed, Lillian Gordon is eventually âbusted . . . for harboring undocumenteds, exploiting them (the prosecution said) for free cooking cleaning and yard workâ (121). Therefore, the state has in effect âtaken care ofâ Lillian Gordon and need not rely on outside actors like Jasmine. Unable to testify because of her âown delicate status,â Jasmine writes a letter of support wherein she asserts that Lillian ârepresented to me the best in the American experience and the American characterâ (121). Hence, Lillian not only provides Jasmine asylum; like the statuary âmother of exiles,â she emblematizes for the immigrant protagonist an idealized âAmerica.â What is more, Lillian is responsible for Jasmineâs initiation into assimilation. Renamed âJazzy,â the protagonist learns from Lillian how to walk and dress âAmericanâ (118â119).
An assimilated subject (via âwalkâ and âdressâ), Jazzy/Jasmine eventually journeys north to Queens, New York, where for five months she stays with her husbandâs acquaintance Professorji and his extended family. Within the confines of a predominantly Punjabi Flushing neighborhood, Jasmine confronts the borders of a âtraditionalâ Indian community existence, which offer little access to employment outside the home. Jasmine again takes flight, this time to Manhattan, where she finds work as a live-in nanny for the abovementioned Taylor and Wylie. It is on the Upper West Side, away from the Indian affects of the Flushing neighborhood and the country of origin, where Jasmine declares: âI became an American in an apartment on Claremont Avenue across the street from Barnard College Dormitoryâ (145). Renamed Jase, the increasingly Americanized Jasmine discovers a heretofore unknown rootedness. According to Jase/Jasmine, âAmerica may be fluid and built on flimsy, invisible lines of weak gravity, but I was a dense object. I had landed and was getting rootedâ (159).
Central to Jase/Jasmineâs newfound ârootednessâ is her ability to âresponsiblyâ negotiate a capitalist economy. At first, Jasmineâs enthusiastic and excessive consumption of mail-order goods threatens her economic well-being. Spending her money on meaningless commodities, Jasmine initially succumbs to the lure of U.S. consumer culture. Nonetheless, with the help of her American âfamily,â Jasmine regains control of her finances, which in turn gives rise to claims of being âlanded and getting rooted.â Jasmine proudly asserts, âI had controlled my spending and now sat on an account that was rapidly growing. Every day I was being paid for something newâ (159). In the face of her illegal worker status, Jasmine is still committed to a conservative capitalistic ethic. Jasmineâs model minority subjectivity is reified through âhard workâ and âperseveranceâ in the face of adversity.
Furthermore, Jasmineâs (unintentional but still legible) willingness to enact justice against an illegal alien smuggler makes her a border-conscious âmodel minority.â This model minoritization is apparent in a scene with Taylor and Duff in Central Park. The idyllic and romantic tenor of the moment is interrupted by Jasmineâs sighting of an Indian hot dog vendor. Jasmine tells Taylor, âThat was the man who killed my husband. . . . He knows . . . he knows me. He knows Iâm hereâ (167â168). When Taylor asks why she cannot go to the state authorities, Jasmine replies, âDonât you see thatâs impossible? Iâm illegal here, he knows that. I canât come out and challenge him. Iâm very exposedâ (168). Notwithstanding Jasmineâs initial unwillingness to confront the man responsible for her husbandâs death, the protagonist all the same enacts her revenge via immigration policy.
Expressly, after fleeing to Iowa, Jasmine confesses:
Sukkhi, the New York vendor, pushes his hot dog cart through my head. I do not seek to forgive, and I have long let go of my plans for revenge. I can live with both impulses. I have even written an anonymous letter to the INS, suggesting they look into the status of a certain Sukhwinder Singh, who pushes a hot-dog cart in New York City. . . . I dream only of neutralizing harm, not absolute and permanent conquest. (180â181)
In reporting Sukkhi to the INS, Jasmine once again assumes the performative role of a border patrol agent. As an undocumented immigrant-turned-INS informant, Jasmineâs desire to âneutralizeâ her husbandâs murderer is negotiated through state-authorized means. Jasmineâs letter reveals not the crime Sukkhi has committed but rather pushes the authorities to evaluate his citizenship status. Therefore, it is through the stateâand its deportation apparatusâthat Jasmine attempts to avenge her husbandâs death. On another level, the Jasmine/Sukkhi episode links terrorism to illegal immigration. In so doing, Jasmine makes visible a transnational reconciliation to a particular Indian conflict. If Jasmineâs first husband dies as a result of domestic Indian terrorism, the protagonist is able to avenge his death through domestic U.S. immigration policy, via INS notification. This reading confirms Jasmineâs naturalization vis-Ă -vis amnesty. Though an undocumented worker, Jasmine is nonetheless a subject seeking asylum from country-of-origin politics emblematized by Sukkhi.
Taken together, Jasmineâs journey northward and westward, her pioneering spirit in the face of uncertainty, and her rise from child bride to woman and mother (or coming-of-age story) make visible a âtypical immigrant Americanâ narrative. Simultaneously, the âtypicalityâ of the South Asian immigrant-turned-American is complicated by Jasmineâs transformation from rural Indian subject to transnational body to American citizen. It is her ability to perform a naturalized foreignness that makes Jasmine a true 1980s American heroine. After all, she successfully repudiates an undocumented sensibility and gains (through proxy) a de facto documented selfhood. Correspondingly, Jasmineâs ânaturalizationâ intersects with late twentieth-century politics. As Susan Koshy argues, Jasmine reflects âsocial and political changes within the United States [that] contributed toward the rearticulation of the meanings of Asian American femininity. The breakdown of overt racial barriers following civil rights struggles, the positioning of Asian Americans as model minorities, the valorization of multiculturalism, and the celebration of ethnic difference created a more varied terrain within which racial, sexual, and class differences produce the possibilities of Americanization.â23 Hence, Jasmine speaks to both the social rise of multiculturalism and the political changes inherent in a post-1986 Simpson-Mazzoli Act immigration imaginary. With heightened awareness of illegality and regulation, Jasmineâs American identity is principally in conflict with her illegal subjectivity. Nevertheless, this illegal subjectivityâwhich positions her on the âwrong sideâ of immigration policyâis subverted by Jasmineâs willingness to police other illicit bodies. In doing so, Jasmine as character (and Jasmine as narrative) draws attention to an alternate model minorityhood/citizenship born out of immigration regulation.
Denaturalizing English: U.S. English and Eva Hoffmanâs Lost in Translation
Who, among my peers, is sure of what is success and what is failure? Who would want to be sure? Who is sure of purposes, meanings, national goals? Perhaps a successful immigrant is an exaggerated version of the native. From now on, Iâll be made, like a mosaic, of fragmentsâand my consciousness of them. It is only in that observing consciousness that I remain, after all, an immigrant.
âHOFFMAN, LOST IN TRANSLATION
If the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli Act employed a âhumanitarianâ response to the impending immigration crisis, it necessarily deployed (as Jasmine illustrates) a regulatory agenda via border patrols and workplace surveillance. Simultaneously, the act reinscribed tenets of U.S. naturalization through its requirement of residency and a âminimal understanding of English.â In particular, the legibility of immigrants as U.S. subjects is principally charted through the ability to âunderstandâ (or translate) English. In contrast, Eva Hoffmanâs Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language disrupts dominant, naturalized readings of âsuccessful immigration.â Rather than distinguish the âforeignerâ from the ânative,â in the above passage Hoffman collapses the two categories. In line with Hoffmanâs interpellation, the immigrant becomes an exaggerated version of the native who nevertheless remains fragmented.
In this manner, Hoffman introduces an alternative reading of the immigrant body through multiplicity and paradox. Eschewing claims of multicultural nationhood such as U.S. melting-pot or Canadian mosaic, Hoffman instead lays linguistically bare the polyvocal routes through which citizenship is âmade.â As Lost in Translation repeatedly avows, the dominant rubric for immigrant âsuccess,â monoculturalism, is largely uncertain (âwho is sure?â) and ideologically driven (âpurposes, meanings, national goals?â). Indeed, such rubrics for success undergird the foundations of a particular late-century culture war.
As the likes of Sheriff Duffy make plain, turn-of-the-twenty-first-century nativism concentrates on criminality or illegality and multilingualism. Explicitly, the anxiety over multilingualism (and multiculturalism) pits native speakers against the foreign-born. Articulating patriotism through âcommon languageâ proclamations, English-only movements relied, and continue to rely, on an âusâ versus âthemâ binary.24 To be sure, the rise of such English-only movements in the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s reveal an unquestionably racialized politics. Correspondingly, those âlost in translationâ are cast as the primary antagonists in a national cultural narrative.
The most politically empowered organization in the movement was U.S. English, founded in 1983 by Dr. John Tanton, former director of the Sierra Clubâs population committee and Zero Population Growth, and Senator S. I. Hayakawa of California, who was also the president of San Francisco State College during the 1967â1968 student strikes. An advocacy group committed to making English the âofficialâ national language, U.S. English initially seemed a valid, albeit conservative political group, with support from the likes of Walter Cronkite, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Saul Below, and Gore Vidal.25 Its executive director, Linda Chavez, was a leading Republican who would eventually gain notoriety as a failed George W. Bush Secretary of Labor nominee. Ironically, within the context of 1980s âimmigration illegality,â Chavez at the time employed Guatemalan Marta Mercado, an undocumented domestic worker.
Even so, the organizationâs legitimacy was irrevocably undermined not by Chavezâs employment practices, which were revealed in 2001, but by the publication of an internal memorandum. The memo, dated October 10, 1986, surfaced in 1988, just as Arizona voters were to decide on an English-only state referendum. In the memo, U.S. English cofounder John Tanton wrote:
Gobernar es poblar translates âto govern is to populate.â . . . In this society where the majority rules, does this hold? Will the present majority peaceably hand over its political power to a group that is simply more fertile? . . . Perhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to get caught with those with their pants down! . . . As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion?26
A self-described Malthusian, Tanton begins his argument with Argentine political philosopher Juan Bautista Alberdi, who celebrates the role immigrants play in politics and nation building.27 Alberdiâs decidedly pro-immigrant stance through Tantonâs cooptation turns sinister and morally corrupt, with allusions to uncontrolled sexuality and reproduction. Couched as a struggle between the âmajority Whiteâ population and the unregulated, inferior âminority,â Tantonâs call to action makes visible the same reactionary politics as the abovementioned San Diego County officials. Accordingly, whiteness becomes a site of victimhood (that is, immigration has led to a decline in âpower and control over their livesâ). Analogously, âWhitesâ are cast as an essential political bloc to be mobilized via anti-immigrant, English-only action.
Incontrovertibly, Tantonâs anxiety over immigrant bodies and reproduction accesses a century-long nativism, redolent of past and present racialized âperilâ discourses. To that end, Tantonâs appeal to âdemocratic virtueââevident in his observation that the United States is a society in which the âmajority rulesââis all the same constructed against a threatening minority presence. Despite the anti-immigrant currency of such pronouncements, the overtly racist nature of the Tanton memo did not sit well in a post-civil rights moment. The publication of the memo led to resignations by Cronkite and executive director Linda Chavez. Tanton himself resigned following the scandal, though he would resurface in 1994 as a founder of ProEnglish, which carried an identical English-only agenda.
Similarly, the cultural aims of U.S. English would also resurface. In February 1989, New Yorkâs Suffolk County was faced with an âofficial Englishâ bill. The proposed initiative would eliminate bilingual county publications such as brochures and pamphlets. Additionally, the bill would reduce bilingual country jobs and prohibit the local Human Rights Commission from investigating English-only discrimination cases. The billâs supporters claimed the initiative would âspeed the assimilation of immigrants into American society and curb a growing number of bilingual programs in county government.â28 Though the Suffolk County bill did not pass, it nonetheless illustrates a potent English-only trend. That same year, English-only initiatives were put on the ballot in seventeen states, including Florida, Arizona, and Colorado.
The English-only goal of âspeedy assimilationâ is incontestably undermined in Hoffmanâs Lost in Translation. As Katarzyna Marciniak maintains, though Lost in Translation âends on a note of immigrant success, Evaâs story questions conventional immigrant narratives of complete assimilation.â29 Significantly, Hoffmanâs linguistic interrogation opposes the very foundations of the U.S. English movement. As Lost in Translation elucidates, English acquisition does not lead to wholesale assimilation. Nor does linguistic naturalization resolve alien subjectivities and concomitant feelings of alienation. Taken together, Eva Hoffmanâs Lost in Translation situates the immigrant body within a conflicted cultural terrain, and maps, through migration and translation, the affective toll of relocation.
The child of Jewish Holocaust survivors, Hoffman is a postwar product born in 1946. From the outset, Hoffman examines her citizenship via Jewishness. As Hoffman insists, âbeing Jewish is something definite; it is something that I am.â Still, this location is circumscribed by a lingering anti-Semitism, which is a âsubject . . . [that] now [in the mid-1950s] comes up frequentlyâ and represents âa darkness of the mind, a prejudiceârather than a deviation from moral principlesâ (32). Because of such virulent anti-Semitism, Hoffmanâs Jewishness (the site of her original citizenship) threatens her and her familyâs Polish selfhood. Consequently, Hoffmanâs family leaves Poland in 1959, when Hoffman is thirteen years old.30 Such anti-Semitism foregrounds a reading of Lost in Translation through amnesty frames in a manner reminiscent of Mukherjeeâs Jasmine. Both Hoffman and Jasmine are victims of home country violence, potential and actualized.
This âimmigration/refugee storyâ foregrounds Lost in Translation, and Hoffman reads her forced relocation primarily through language (as indicated by the memoirâs title). Divided into three sections (âParadise,â âExile,â and âThe New Worldâ), Lost in Translation begins in Poland, which the author configures (or writes) as a âparadiseâ location. The familyâs relocation to Vancouver comprises the âexileâ section, wherein Hoffman must learn to articulate selfhood through a non-native language, English. The final sectionââThe New Worldââtakes place in the United States (in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and New York City). Situated in the fabric of social, political, and personal change, Hoffmanâs memoir cartographically reproduces the emotional contours of the immigrant landscape.
Moreover, Lost in Translation brings to light the affective and linguistic dimensions of citizenship. Responding to fellow immigrant claims of âsuccessâ through assimilation, Hoffman observes:
Theirs is an immigrant story, and thatâs the story of their lives that they accept. But perhaps, if they had the words to say just what they feel, something different might pour out, an elusive complaint of an elusive ailment. For insofar as meaning is interhuman and comes from the thickness of human connections and how richly you are known, these successful immigrants have lost some of their meaning. In their separateness and silence, their wisdomâwhat they used to know in an intimate way, on their skinâis stifled and dries up a little. (143)
Hoffmanâs analysis of âan immigrant storyâ connects citizenship, language, and affect. Indeed, such a stock immigrant story nevertheless fails to encompass elusive complaints and elusive ailments. This breakdown is due to the paucity of adequate language (âwords to say just what they feelâ). The âsuccessfulâ immigrant falls short because intimate meaning is lost in dominant discourse, which for the most part is overdetermined to fit a naturalization end.
Equally, the ensuing assimilationist narrative is, above all, an essentialized tale that âstifles,â lacking individual complexity and connection. The absence of difference speaks to the naturalization of âsuccessful immigrantâ narratives, which privilege e pluribus unum citizenships. In contrast, Hoffmanâs âimmigrant storyâ reproduces an ex uno plures (out of one, many) selfhood. Despite her status as a Polish Jewish Canadian turned Polish Jewish Canadian American, Hoffman does not lose identities so much as she accretes affiliations and citizenships. Correspondingly, Hoffman becomes a self-inscribed transnational national. This reading of multiplicity is at once geographically configured. From Cracow to Vancouver, from Houston to Cambridge, from Boston to New York City, Hoffmanâs memoir undeniably crosses multiple national and state borders. In the process, Lost in Translation principally becomes a narrative of statelessness and unbounded selfhoods.
Repeatedly at stake in Lost in Translation is the inadequacy of language to concretize citizenship. Illustratively, Hoffman avers, âYou canât transport human meanings whole from one culture to another any more than you can transliterate a textâ (175). This failure to translate consumes Hoffmanâs memoir, which is likewise filled with moments of âlinguistic inadequacy.â Simultaneously, the critique of transliterationâto represent letters from one language directly into anotherâhighlights the incomplete processes of cultural exchange. Focused on the failure of translation and transliteration, Lost in Translation necessarily challenges English-only movements that evaluate citizenship viability on the basis of monoculturalism. Hoffman further weakens claims of English superiority with the assertion that âEnglish words donât hook on to anythingâ and that they âfloat in an uncertain spaceâ (108). On one level, the lack of English âsituatednessâ mirrors Hoffmanâs immigrant identity, which analogously âfloats in an uncertain space.â
On another level, such linguistic instability (embodied by the claim that âEnglish doesnât hook on to anythingâ) denaturalizes the dominant languageâs position to mimetically and unilaterally inscribe nation-state affiliation. Though Hoffman can speak and write English, the physical act is unmatched by abstract meaning, which renders language an incomplete signifier of citizenship. Her negotiation with translation necessarily forces her âto write in the language of the present, even if itâs not the language of selfâ (121). In Lost in Translation, such presentist languageânecessarily fixed to a specific temporalityâdoes not address the dynamic development of the immigrant body (or self) over time and space. For that reason, Hoffmanâs assertion that one cannot âtransport human meaningsâ gestures toward a fluid, transnational selfhood.
What is more, the affective inertia of past immigrant selves is foreshadowed in the memoirâs opening pages. As Hoffman recollects:
We canât be leaving all this behindâbut we are: I am thirteen years old, and we are emigrating. Itâs a notion of such crushing, definitive finality that to me might as well mean the end of the world. . . . I desperately want time to stop, to hold the ship still with the force of my will. I am suffering my first, severe attack of nostalgia, or tesknotaâa word that adds to nostalgia the tonalities of sadness and longing. It is a feeling whose shades and degrees Iâm destined to know intimately. (3)
From the outset, Hoffman subverts the expected immigrant narrative. Rather than embracing the New World, the thirteen-year-old Hoffman desperately wants to stop and hold the ship still. With affective mention of desperation, sadness, and longing, Hoffmanâs preemigrant account introduces an emotional intimacy that promptly establishes cost and loss. Though Hoffmanâs family leaves Poland âvoluntarily,â the introductory description produces a refugee discourse, evident in âdesperateâ acts to remain âin country.â Besides, this intimacy is marked by âshades and degreesâ and is best understand through sad nostalgia (tesknota), which lacks absolute definition in English. All things considered, Hoffmanâs account of departure militates against literal translation. Instead, this âpartingâ anecdote is figured through approximation of words and emotion.
Like the linguistic difficulties she encounters, Hoffmanâs transnational affect (embodied in tesknota) refuses complete naturalization. Despite the memoirâs titular assertion that Hoffman is living a new life in a new language, the untranslatable is a palpable source of distress, trauma, and denaturalization. This particular failure of language conversion is immediately apparent in the memoirâs âExileâ section. Spefically, Hoffman details a classroom interaction in which her Canadian teacher struggles with the protagonistâs name. Unable to properly pronounce Hoffmanâs first name âEwaâ as âEva,â her teacher (a de facto representative of nation via public education) renames her âEH-vah.â Similarly, Hoffmanâs sister Alina is renamed âElaine.â This ârenamingâ episode is an undeniable source of alienation for the autobiographical protagonist, who writes: âwe walk to our seats, into a room of unknown faces, with names that make us strangers to ourselvesâ (105). Denaturalized through naming, Hoffmanâs assertions of âstrangenessâ therefore reinforce a reading of the âforeignâ in the face of assimilative speech act.
Ironically, the classroom as denaturalization site is briefly revised later in the memoir. As Hoffman learns to âlive in a new language,â she nevertheless sees herself as a distinct protagonist in a larger âAmericanizationâ performance (that is, the naturalization ceremony). Following the completion of her Harvard doctorate, Hoffman notes that âLike characters in a climactic scene of a comic opera summoned to deliver a furiously paced summation, the main figures of my personal mythology have all gathered in one place at the very point when, in effect, I receive the certificate of full Americanization. . . . Everything comes together, everything I love, as in the fantasies of my childhood; I am the sum of my partsâ (226). Supplanting a âdrama of Americanizationâ with a âcomic operaâ (calling to mind Gilbert and Sullivan light comedies), Hoffman relies on the main figures of her personal mythology. The episodeâs crowning momentâthe receipt of a diploma that resembles a certificate of full Americanizationâbrings everything together. The oldest university in the United States, Harvard as symbolic institution is imbued with âfirst immigrantâ meaning embodied in Puritan emigrants from England. Established in 1636, Harvard predates U.S. nationhood, yet its connection to a Puritanical past makes it a national emblem of âcity upon a hillâ progress. Following suit, as a graduate whose institution was accepting of her, Hoffman is (at least for the moment) naturalized (226).
Nonetheless, this naturalization feeling is fleeting. In the end, Hoffmanâs immigrant selfhood, the source of her inability to adequately translate, becomes her principal anchor in the New World. Hoffmanâs story, overtly reminiscent of Mary Antinâs The Promised Land, takes a different direction via selfhood claims. If upon arriving at and assimilating in the United States, Antin was âborn, remade, and born again,â Hoffman is not so much remade as she is amended. As the memoir progresses, Hoffmanâs old identities ebb and flow, largely remaining fluid. The âback and forthâ nature of Hoffmanâs many selfhoods is deliberately suggestive of translation as an identifiable practice, which is similarly unfixed. Correspondingly, Hoffman repeatedly returns to the meaning of translation (the carrying across of meaning through language) as an ever incomplete process that still offers agency within the U.S. cultural landscape.
Moreover, instead of naturalization, Hoffman (unlike her Jasmine counterpart) privileges a priori and composite citizenships. Specifically, Hoffmanâs past identity as the daughter of Polish refugees affords her first-person access to citizenship rupture and selfhood eruption. Compelled to listen in order to learn to speak, Hoffman eschews one-sided forms of literacy. In their place, Hoffman offers the following observation: âItâs difficult to tell the truth to another person. The self is a complicated mechanism, and to speak it forth honestly requires not only sincerity but the agility to catch insight on the wing and the artistry to give it accurate words. It also requires a listener who can catch our nuances as they fly by. Spoken truth shrivels when it falls on a tin earâ (279). To understand the self, and by extension selfhood, Hoffman stresses the need for multiple literacies. In order to understand the American (and, in the grander scheme, the human) experience, one must be willing to speak with sincerity but have the necessary agility to carefully render meaning. Thus, Hoffman advocates an in-depth practice that also requires a listener attuned to nuances. Such a position produces a reading of selves focused not on essentialized economies of understanding but two-sided literacy acts that involve both reading and listening.
Alternatively, emphasizing complexity in the face of immigration debates that privilege âEnglish onlyâ and strict regulation, Hoffman resists compartmentalization, classification, and containment. In the process, as Katarzyna Marciniak observes, Hoffman is chiefly invested not so much in state-sanctioned selfhood as self-determined âalienhood.â This alienhood makes visible Hoffmanâs âtextualization of the in-between space of resistance: resistance to a traditional notion of assmiliation that works to accept, but also absorb and flatten the exile; resistance to smoothing out the foreignerâs otherness, and a defiance against the creation of a new proper subject that erases her past so that she can successfully function in a new communityâ (79). As well, Hoffmanâs assertion of an immigrant location is predicated on multiple citizenships. This composite selfhood is determined by history (that is, a forced relocation as a result of the Holocaust and its aftermath), by her religious affiliation as a Jew, her political Polish selfhood, and her linguistic acquisition of English. A multivalent cultural citizen, Hoffman simultaneously inhabits multiple linguistic spaces. In articulating her location vis-Ă -vis her immigrant identity, Hoffman declares allegiance to the many selfhoods contained within it. She is thus a denaturalized subject through Canada and the United States but nonetheless a world citizen (albeit bifurcated).
Finally, Hoffmanâs phenomenological explorations of English enable her to rethink not how Americans are âmadeâ but instead how they are âunmade.â In other words, Hoffmanâs unique locationâreflecting a sense of not only living in two worlds but within multiple words and languagesâproduces a deconstructive reading of U.S. citizenship. Indeed, Hoffman remarks that her American friends:
share so many assumptions that are quite invisible to them, precisely because they are shared. These are assumptions about the most fundamental human transactions, subcutaneous beliefs, which lie just below the stratum of political opinion or overt ideology: how much âspace,â physical or psychological, we need to give each other, how much âcontrolâ is desirable, about what is private and what is public. (210â211)
Configuring her American friends as a âreadableâ text, Hoffman enacts (to all intents and purposes) a translation of citizenship. Noting that their selfhood is constructed not on tangible characteristics but more abstract assumptions and âsubcutaneous beliefs,â Hoffman deconstructs the very tenets of naturalization as a learned process. When it is all said and done, Hoffman undercuts the communal power of naturalization, which does not necessarily lead to a shared citizenship or political kinship. To be sure, if naturalization is a state-authorized process, then the question of who can or cannot naturalize is determined not by sentimental declarations of faith but by constructed political opinion and overt ideology.
Indeed, it is between poles of public opinion, politics, and debates over immigration that Jasmine and Lost in Translation are largely circumscribed and contained. Correspondingly, U.S. citizenship thematically undergirds Bharati Mukherjeeâs novel and Eva Hoffmanâs memoir, which are structurally determined through the shifting terrain of present-day immigration policy. Accordingly situated within a space of mixed immigrant feelings, declarations of race and racism, and delimited by the ever-pressing state need to regulate immigration, Jasmine and Lost in Translation underscore a late twentieth-century unresolved tension. Such anxiety foregrounds, influences, and shapes 1980s and early 1990s characterizations of the nation through and against immigrant bodies.
Haunted by politics in the country of origin and marked by multiple border crossings, Jasmineâs protagonist and Hoffmanâs narrator self attempt to settleâthrough affect and naturalizationâthe pressing matter of U.S. selfhood. On another level, connotative of deciphering acts, comprehension moves, and strategies that foment readability, the question of citizenship legibility in Jasmine and Lost in Translation is negotiated through history, memory, speech, and grammar. Such an analysis provokes a reading of Jasmine as a text consumed with an unstable form of âremarkable Americannessâ principally forged through the regulation of immigrant bodies. In Eva Hoffmanâs Lost in Translation, at stake is an unachievable âAmericannessâ that thematically undermines melting-pot utopianism. In related fashion, if Bharati Mukherjeeâs Jasmine highlights a national focus on illegality and immigrant bodies at the turn of the twenty-first century, then Eva Hoffmanâs Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language examines the role of language in the making (and unmaking) of Americans.
In so doing, Hoffmanâs memoir further addresses contemporary immigrant-oriented debates that dominated late twentieth-century public discourse. As a result, Jasmine and Lost in Translation engender a totalizing reading of the cultural and political dimensions of late 1980s immigration policy. Illustratively, African American writer Alice Walker notes: âJasmine begins to answer some of the questions I have had about the emotional landscape of recent immigrants to this country. This is a novel of great importance to any contemporary insight into ourselves as Americans in the midst of enormous social, political, and personal changes.â31 Walkerâs reading of Jasmine speaks not only to the shifting terrain of Americanness in the midst of enormous social, political, and personal changes, but to the question of the emotional landscape of recent immigrants. In turn, Walker concretizes the affective dimensions of U.S. selfhood, which are forged through the contested crucible of politics and culture.
Such affective dimensions were more than apparent in Reaganâs Liberty Weekend remarks, which structure a patriotic love of country through immigrant emblem (the Statue of Liberty). However, such âstructures of nationalistic feelingâ were most embodied in a citizenship spectacle that followed Reaganâs address. To be sure, this momentâwhich exists in the shadow of Lady Libertyâs centennial celebrationâbrings into focus a late twentieth-century understanding of citizenship through repudiation and reclamation. Meant to recognize twelve âremarkable naturalized Americans,â the subsequent Medal of Liberty ceremony worked in media-oriented conjunction with the statueâs anniversary celebration. If the initial focus of Liberty Weekend was the reconstructed celebration of the statueâs iconic immigrant status, then the recognition of âremarkableâ naturalized bodies offers further proof that Americans are not only made but also fashioned into nation-building laborers. Conjured up by Liberty Weekend producer David L. Wolper, the Medal of Liberty was an award created specifically for the statueâs centennial. Notwithstanding the medalâs mass-media roots, the award was without a doubt state-authorized and state-sanctioned, with the Reagan administration responsible for the selection of recipients from the realm of politics and the fields of art, science, and culture.
Among those âremarkably recognizedâ was cold war/Nixon administration fixture Henry Kissinger, a Jewish subject whose family escaped Nazi Germany in 1938. Similarly, fellow German American Hanna Holborn Gray, the nationâs first female university president, fled her country of origin when confronted with assured fascist persecution.32 The legacy of Nazi rule is abundantly plain in the case of Medal of Liberty recipient Elie Wiesel, a Romanian Jewish Holocaust survivor and, like Kissinger, a Nobel Prize winner.33 Kissinger, Gray, and Wiesel were joined by Jewish Americans Dr. Albert B. Sabin, inventor of the oral polio vaccine, who emigrated from Poland, and Itzhak Perlman, renowned Israeli American violin virtuoso. Panama-born Kenneth B. Clark, an African American psychologist most known for his role in conducting the doll tests used to dismantle âseparate but equalâ in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), was another Medal of Liberty beneficiary. Also present was Franklin R. Chang-Diaz, the first Hispanic astronaut, who originally hailed from Costa Rica. Two first-generation Chinese Americans and one former British subject were also recognized as âremarkable naturalized Americansâ: I. M Pei, respected architect; famed computer engineer/entrepreneur An Wang; and USO tour stalwart Bob Hope, a comedian/entertainer born in London, England.34 The final recipient, Russian Jewish American composer Irving Berlin, who wrote âGod Bless America,â was unable to make it to the ceremony due to illness and was awarded his medal in absentia.35
The ethnic backgrounds of the twelve recipients did not go unnoticed by the always opinionated New York City Mayor Koch. As Time magazine reporter Richard Stengel sardonically notes, the mayor, âever ready to leap to the defense of ethnicity,â took issue with the absence of particular hyphenated Americans. Decrying the dearth of Irish and Italian recipients, Koch âdenounced the awards as âidioticâ and promptly decided to give out 87 medals of his own.â36 Despite Kochâs tongue-in-cheek response to the Medal of Liberty award list, the selection of specific naturalized subjects makes more seriously discernible the conservative multicultural, model minority politics that characterized the Reagan administration and the 1980s. Tellingly missing from the roster of remarkable naturalized Americans were civil rights protestors, revolutionary activists, and 1960s radicals. Instead, what united the group of Medal of Liberty honorees was their presidentially legible faith in the nation, which implicitly precluded dramatic calls for systemic change. Certainly, their very naturalizationâdependent on the state-authorized fulfillment of patriotic and residency requirementsâpolitically signaled the voluntary repudiation by each âremarkable Americanâ of past affiliations and their state-sanctioned commitment to U.S. principles.
In this regard, the Medal of Liberty recipients adhered to the presidentâs consistent appeal to individual responsibility, undying belief in teleologies of racial progress, and dismissal of social welfare programs. The emphasis on individualism and discipline, a trademark position for the former New Deal advocate-turned-supply-side economist, was clear in a February 23, 1984, address to Asian and Pacific American leaders. President Reagan credited Asian Americans with helping to âpreserve [the American] dream by living up to the bedrock values that make us a good and a worthy people.â The president then clarified, averring, âIâm talking about principles that begin with the sacred worth of human life, religious faith, community spirit . . . tolerance, hard work, fiscal responsibility, cooperation, and love.â37
In contrast to the model minoritization of Asian Americans, the fortieth president (whose administration was openly antiâaffirmative action, dismissive of social welfare programs, and unabashedly supportive of South Africa during apartheid) publicly questioned the objectives of African American civil rights leaders who continued to push for social justice. In an oft-quoted statement, Reagan reportedly inquired, âSometimes I wonder if they [civil rights activists] really mean what they say, because some of those leaders are doing very well leading organizations based on keeping alive the feeling that theyâre victims of prejudice.â38 In this instance, the affective feeling of prejudice is rendered rhetorically invalid through Reaganâs question, which presupposes an uncertainty about ârealâ versus imagined meaning. In doing so, Reagan circulates a reading that civil rights leadersâand not actual systemic racismâare responsible for the perpetuation of victimhood. Reaganâs questioning of prejudice is reminiscent of the 1960s political foundation for the Asian American model minority myth. Consistent with established model minority logics disseminated in mass press venues like the New York Times and U.S. News and World Report, Reaganâs casting of âAsian American dream holdersâ versus histrionic African American activists makes irrefutably visible a divisive people-of-color politics and selective affirmations of probationary whiteness.
What is more, the inclusion of Jewish refugees and Asian immigrants in the Reagan administration-sanctioned Medal of Liberty ceremony equally highlights a conservative cold war model minoritization that reconfigures, revises, and celebrates narratives of U.S. domestic and foreign policy. Accordingly, the preponderance of individuals connected to World War II confirms a dominant U.S. narrative of the war as âthe good fight.â Additionally, the Medal of Liberty awardees from eastern Europe and Asia substantiate a correlative conservative narrative of the postâWorld War II era as âthe good fight against communist totalitarianism.â39 With âremarkable Americansâ from formerly fascist and communist nation-states (including China, Poland, and Romania), the Medal of Liberty ceremony implicitly underscores twentieth-century foreign policy triumphalism and simultaneously monumentalizes the âbenevolentâ success of cold war political conversion policies. Domestically, Americaâs Jim Crow pastâexemplified by Kenneth B. Clarkâs work and presenceâis to varying degrees âreconciledâ on stage, which presents an integrated body politic constitutive of naturalized citizens.
Most significant (given the focus on immigrants-turned-Americans), the problematic immigration policies of the twentieth centuryâwith wide-ranging racialized immigration quotas, inclusive of nation-state preferences, and replete with racial citizenship requirementsâwere in ânaturalizedâ fashion predictably omitted from the Liberty Weekend celebration.40 As a consequence, the Medal of Liberty ceremony offers for public consumption embodied âsolutionsâ to the very questions (the âwomenâs question,â the âChinese question,â the âgreat ethnic question,â and the âimmigrant questionâ) that began and persisted throughout the twentieth century. And, for those reasons, the inclusion of Jewish and Asian American Medal of Liberty recipients publicly and politically instantiates an amended and euphemistic sense of U.S. nationhood reliant on a model minoritized tolerance. The Medal of Liberty beneficiaries are deemed remarkable because in large part they personified a nostalgic, open-door immigration past and a now unproblematic civil rights present.41